I absolutely agree with this graph-which is one reason why I believe weed should be legal. I am addicted to one drug-caffeine. If I do not have a caffeinated soda for almost exactly 24 hours, I get a fucking killer headache.

it really has nothing to do with addiction, proving its not as addictive as other substances physiologically means nothing and doesnt mean people arent going to abuse the drug when given the opportunity. it's more to do with what it does to people's mental states and brain chemistry with prolonged use . you don't see the effects of it that much because you're either not exposed to fucked up potheads who end up with brain chemical problems or you've never been a pothead yourself and feel what it does to you after a while. this issue is not as prevalent in the states because of how hard weed is cracked down upon and how much of a closet issue it is for most people . in canada where high grade cannabis is widely available and easy to abuse it is a much bigger problem.

its easy to smoke up once in a while and say oh yeah this shits great, it should be legal for me to purchase it and everyone should be doing it, but really if you were able to buy pot whenever you wanted you would either turn into a pothead that needed medical intervention/treatment or quit smoking all together because of how sick you'll get of how it makes you feel after a while and how much money you're blowing on it.

if it were legalized costs for people going to psychiatrists and psych wards would blow up like hiroshima and people who made a profit off of selling dope would turn to harder drug dealing to turn a profit. it will NEVER be legalized in the states, deal with it. i love smoking once in a while and i agree penalties for it in some places are way out of line, but I would not be happy for kids to be able to get their hands on it easily and for it to be accepted into mainstream society.

it really has nothing to do with addiction, proving its not as addictive as other substances physiologically means nothing and doesnt mean people arent going to abuse the drug when given the opportunity. it's more to do with what it does to people's mental states and brain chemistry with prolonged use . you don't see the effects of it that much because you're either not exposed to fucked up potheads who end up with brain chemical problems or you've never been a pothead yourself and feel what it does to you after a while. this issue is not as prevalent in the states because of how hard weed is cracked down upon and how much of a closet issue it is for most people . in canada where high grade cannabis is widely available and easy to abuse it is a much bigger problem.

its easy to smoke up once in a while and say oh yeah this shits great, it should be legal for me to purchase it and everyone should be doing it, but really if you were able to buy pot whenever you wanted you would either turn into a pothead that needed medical intervention/treatment or quit smoking all together because of how sick you'll get of how it makes you feel after a while and how much money you're blowing on it.

if it were legalized costs for people going to psychiatrists and psych wards would blow up like hiroshima and people who made a profit off of selling dope would turn to harder drug dealing to turn a profit. it will NEVER be legalized in the states, deal with it. i love smoking once in a while and i agree penalties for it in some places are way out of line, but I would not be happy for kids to be able to get their hands on it easily and for it to be accepted into mainstream society.

and getting weed for kids is not hard at all. There is more than often multiple kids in any given high school that will sell it to his friends to sell it to other friends etc. They don't even need to worry about getting an older brother or sister to buy it for them.

You've been reading too much propoganda. There is some correlation between use and schitzophrenia but that link has not been proved to be causal in any way. It doesn't cause ADD, it doesn't cause depression, it doesn't alter brain chemistry or function

ok dr pyramid. but all your long winded tripe in this thread has summarily been proven wrong. you are not a psychiatrist or have any intricate knowledge of human brain chemistry so you shouldn't be spreading your own propoganda so matter of factly.

check out the thread I posted above , I've known what it states for a while now, but was always told otherwise by people such as yourself that only know how to gather facts and arguments that fit their own agenda.

I can. Oh, also anyone else the United States. You underestimate the market. I can walk out of my door right now and buy anything from an eighth to two ounces... without leaving my hometown.

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you would either turn into a pothead that needed medical intervention/treatment or quit smoking all together because of how sick you'll get of how it makes you feel after a while and how much money you're blowing on it.

Nice that you pulled out of your ass.

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if it were legalized costs for people going to psychiatrists and psych wards would blow up like hiroshima and people who made a profit off of selling dope would turn to harder drug dealing to turn a profit.

Do you have any statistics to support this ? No? That's because you just made this up. Great job.

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it will NEVER be legalized in the states, deal with it.

You really are a bucket of misinformation, aren't you? It's already been legalized in Denver, and it's close to legalization in the entire state of Alaska. Decriminalization of Marijuana has been the popular thing these days; in California it's a $100 ticket if you're found with under 2oz I believe. Laws are getting more and more lax, until it finally isn't even a misdemeanor to possess.

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i love smoking once in a while and i agree penalties for it in some places are way out of line, but I would not be happy for kids to be able to get their hands on it easily and for it to be accepted into mainstream society.

Like I've stated above: People are already able to get their hands on it easily and it's already been accepted into mainstream society. YOU deal with.

ok dr pyramid. but all your long winded tripe in this thread has summarily been proven wrong. you are not a psychiatrist or have any intricate knowledge of human brain chemistry so you shouldn't be spreading your own propoganda so matter of factly.

check out the thread I posted above , I've known what it states for a while now, but was always told otherwise by people such as yourself that only know how to gather facts and arguments that fit their own agenda.

It amazes me that in the end you can ignore objectivity and mask it in your mind as subjectivity to feel right.

This is not a case of "one report says it causes schizo and another does not, both are valid". One report says it causes schizo, another report examines that report and shows that their means for the conclusion are incorrect, not with the thought "oh I don't like what this says, so I'll change it". But rather with the recognition that the first report was logically flawed. This is not subjective vs subject, this is subjective vs objective. Pyramid is not gathering facts on the side of subjectivity he likes, he is gathering facts on the side of objectivity.

it really has nothing to do with addiction, proving its not as addictive as other substances physiologically means nothing and doesnt mean people arent going to abuse the drug when given the opportunity. it's more to do with what it does to people's mental states and brain chemistry with prolonged use

What? It's addictive potential is exactly what you are talking about when you are talking about the likelyhood of people becoming addicted to and abusing it.

you don't see the effects of it that much because you're either not exposed to fucked up potheads who end up with brain chemical problems or you've never been a pothead yourself and feel what it does to you after a while. this issue is not as prevalent in the states because of how hard weed is cracked down upon and how much of a closet issue it is for most people . in canada where high grade cannabis is widely available and easy to abuse it is a much bigger problem.

OK, lets clarify a few things here. I have plenty of personal experience in drug culture and with people in drug culture. I have plenty of personal experience with weed and with potheads. Weed in canada is not significantly more potent or prevailent than weed in the United states and neither are problems associated with it's use. There are almost as many people who will have smoked weed this year alone in the united states as there are people in all of canada. Unless everyone in canada is toking up you guys are not burning more weed than we are. I'd be interested in seeing some numbers on percapita use in canada but I'm betting the numbers will be pretty similar to our own.

There is little evidence to even suggest that increased potency is more dangerous. According to some studies it may even be more healthy as there seems to be less tar in higher potency cannabis and you need to smoke less of it to get the desired effect. Wine is not more addictive than beer, potent weed is no more addictive than generic commercial grade.

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its easy to smoke up once in a while and say oh yeah this shits great, it should be legal for me to purchase it and everyone should be doing it, but really if you were able to buy pot whenever you wanted you would either turn into a pothead that needed medical intervention/treatment or quit smoking all together because of how sick you'll get of how it makes you feel after a while and how much money you're blowing on it.

I can buy pot right now, it is available in every town in north america. I can smoke all the weed I can afford as it is, as can many many people. There is no shortage of weed thanks to it's prohibited status or the fact that 775,000 people were arrested on marijuana charges alone last year in the states. It is still everywhere.

If it were legal I would be growing it myself in my garden so it wouldn't cost me anything. You could grow it right now if you weren't worried about the government stealing your home and putting you in federal prison on drug manufacture and intent to distribute charges (even if you just grow for yourself). If I did too much and needed treatment I could voluntarily seek it instead of being arrested and forced into ineffective treatment by the government. There is no benefit to keeping it illegal unless you like seeing people go to jail for no good reason.

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if it were legalized costs for people going to psychiatrists and psych wards would blow up like hiroshima and people who made a profit off of selling dope would turn to harder drug dealing to turn a profit.

How so? it is already the third most used drug in the world. are you saying it would become the most used drug in the world? Also what psych problems are you talking about? The ones that have yet to be conclusively linked to it? Hundreds of millions of people smoke weed right now worldwide (160,000,000 estimated). Weed is not some rare phenomenom here in the western hemisphere that we can't let get out of control. Weed has been used the world over for thousands of years by everyone from peasants to royalty without significant problems. If there were going to be massive problems because of weed then they would be happening right now.

Also most of the people who deal pot do it so that they can have free smoke. Most weed dealers have a legitimate job where they make more money than they do dealing weed (70%+ IIRC). See Freakanomics. The likelyhood that all weed dealers will start selling something more addictive if weed is legalized is not that great at all since they are usually selling weed so they can have cheaper/free weed for themselves. If we make weed legal and cheap then there would be no reason for them to sell weed anymore.

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it will NEVER be legalized in the states, deal with it.

Says you. It was legal for thousands of years without issue. It was legal in the united states until the early 1900s when various states made it illegal as a way to harrass unwanted mexicans in the southern states. It was not made illegal because of problems actually associated with it but rather because of the people associated with it (mexicans) and the prevailing poverty(depression), racism and willingness to fall for scare tactics at the time. When enough public outcry was drummed up using false news stories then marijuana was made illegal by people who had no idea what it was or what it was capable of based on outright lies and ignorance. Read the actual debate that occured in congress, if you can call it debate, and tell me that was an informed decision.

i love smoking once in a while and i agree penalties for it in some places are way out of line, but I would not be happy for kids to be able to get their hands on it easily and for it to be accepted into mainstream society.

Kids can get their hands on it easily right now. Please see the monitoring the future survey where every year since 1975, 85%+ of highschool seniors reported having easy access to marijuana and half of them have already tried it. Thank you.

Also, making it legal for adults will not make it any easier for kids to get. First of all kids are buying it off one of their friends right now, probably right in their school. Second, legitimate shops ask for ID, dealers do not. Kids already report that it is easier to get weed than alcohol, why? because you need ID to buy alcohol at the vast majority of the places you can buy it. The vast majority of illicit dealers do not care about ID.

Also keeping weed illegal makes your kids more likely to be introduced to harder drugs as that is the actuall workings of the gateway theory. Dealers who sell weed often sell other drugs as well and thusly weed introduces you to harder and more dangerous drugs. In reality most people have their first drug experience with alcohol or tobacco, usually before they are legally of age to do so. Strange you never hear about that being a gateway...

Perhaps you missed my post in that thread. The findings didn't seem to be as conclusive as the story made it seem. Also, that was dealing with heavy (daily) adolescent use during brain develpment, not all prolonged use or adult use. The problem is specifically with an area of the brain that is developing in adolescence and weed potentially interfering with that development. That doesn't mean that weed = schizophrenia in everyone. That means that there might be a problem but we aren't even sure of that yet.

This just happens to be the latest in a long list of things that, one by one, have been proven false or purposefully misleading or exagerated when it comes to marijuana. I am not saying it is not possible, I just tend to take these things with a grain of salt considering the things you used to be able to get away with saying about marijuana without anyone calling you on it. Just for fun let's have a quick recap:

1937: Marijuana gives you the strength of ten men and makes you invulnerable to bullets as it turns you into a crazed killing and raping machine. Especially if you are mexican or black.
1940s: Hemp for victory, smoking weed still bad.
1950s: Marijuana this week, shooting heroin into your eyeballs next week.
1960s: Marijuana this week, shooting heroin into your eyeballs next week, and it's all a commie plot.
1970s: Smoking marijuana leads to interracial coupling, counterculture and unpatriotic behavior, also heroin and burning draft cards. Interestingly enough vietnam is a gateway to marijuana and herion use for many soldiers.
1980s: Just say no... down with dope, up with hope... mmm mmm crack.
1990s: It makes you stupid and lazy and more likely to do crack.
2000: Don't play with the loaded weapon your father left out on his desk while taking bong rips or you might shoot your friend in the head. Also, we're still playing that gateway theory card.
2002: If you smoke weed then you support terrorists.
2004: If you smoke weed then you will not pay attention to the child you are babysitting and they will drown in a pool. Or you will forget to pick up your little brother or lose your little sister at a fair.
2005: If you smoke weed then you are under the influence of your friends and that is bad because you should only be under the influence of your government and their terrible anti-drug ads.

Also please see my repeated posts where I say that I am absolutely not for kids using drugs. I am absolutely for responsible adults not going to jail for what they choose to put into their bodies. I am not for kids doing drugs even if I would argue that the penalties for doing so should not be so severe.

I don't like to fit facts to my agenda and when I see myself trying to do it I will stop myself because I know that it doesn't help my argument to pull stuff out my ass or to be wrong. I may make mistakes here and there and maybe not list every caveat but I try to be as accurate as possible. I do not say that weed is harmless and that it's healthy for everyone to smoke weed all day long. I do not say that no one has problems with or related to their weed use. But I will still argue that it should be legal despite it's potential harms as the most harm seems to actually be caused by it's illegality because if you objectively compare weed to any number of other perfectly legal but potentially dangerous substances or activities then it should be very hard to justify arresting anyone for the potential harm of weed. Weed is just another area for people to focus on the wrong things. Worried about your teenager? They are more likely to die from autoerotic asphyxiation than weed but you aren't likely see stupid commercials touting the dangers of strangling yourself while masturbating replacing the ones that warn you about the dangers of smoking weed any time soon.

ok dr pyramid. but all your long winded tripe in this thread has summarily been proven wrong. you are not a psychiatrist or have any intricate knowledge of human brain chemistry so you shouldn't be spreading your own propoganda so matter of factly.

Proven wrong by who? Please don't take my word for anything, read the links I provide as they should be considered far more authoritative than I. I am just a person arguing on the internet with my own amassed knowledge. I don't claim to know everything about weed and if I do make any claim I usually cite a specific source so you can go check it out yourself.

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check out the thread I posted above , I've known what it states for a while now, but was always told otherwise by people such as yourself that only know how to gather facts and arguments that fit their own agenda.

Please read all the reasearch available and draw your own conclusions.

Hey, Jim <3 ules, You didn't deserve this because you can't guess numbers but anyways BREAK ON TH

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Originally Posted by damo

it really has nothing to do with addiction, proving its not as addictive as other substances physiologically means nothing and doesnt mean people arent going to abuse the drug when given the opportunity. it's more to do with what it does to people's mental states and brain chemistry with prolonged use . you don't see the effects of it that much because you're either not exposed to fucked up potheads who end up with brain chemical problems or you've never been a pothead yourself and feel what it does to you after a while. this issue is not as prevalent in the states because of how hard weed is cracked down upon and how much of a closet issue it is for most people . in canada where high grade cannabis is widely available and easy to abuse it is a much bigger problem.

its easy to smoke up once in a while and say oh yeah this shits great, it should be legal for me to purchase it and everyone should be doing it, but really if you were able to buy pot whenever you wanted you would either turn into a pothead that needed medical intervention/treatment or quit smoking all together because of how sick you'll get of how it makes you feel after a while and how much money you're blowing on it.

if it were legalized costs for people going to psychiatrists and psych wards would blow up like hiroshima and people who made a profit off of selling dope would turn to harder drug dealing to turn a profit. it will NEVER be legalized in the states, deal with it. i love smoking once in a while and i agree penalties for it in some places are way out of line, but I would not be happy for kids to be able to get their hands on it easily and for it to be accepted into mainstream society.

One thing that has never been considered in these debates is the effect corporations will have on the sale of marijuana. If marijuana were fully legalized, obviously corporations would see huge profit potential in selling the drug. Naturally most of the population would be skeptical at first to try the new drug. But they would see that every person is a potential profit (children, teens, middle age, everyone). So how can they get every person to buy their product?

Advertising, of course! Yes, this will make every person NEED to smoke marijuana so they can fit in, look cool, etc. (just like toy ads, appliance ads, cigarette ads and alcohol ads do!) Imagine a young child now, just beginning to watch tv, read magazines, listen to the radio, etc. Everywhere this child will see ads wanting him to smoke this drug. Iím not going to go into the effects of advertising here, but the fact is it is brutally effective. So, to avoid a massive amount of child users, make it illegal for corporations to advertise to younger children, say under 18 (since that is when we become adults by law and can make our own decisions). But you canít do this, corporations will win every lawsuit, because it infringes on their right to sell to their target consumer (the company is a person too!). So maybe make it illegal to buy under the age of 18, just like cigarettes, which will recreate nearly every problem with the current illegal state of the drug. (which is a whole other story)

So, we have a large number of people using this harmless drug for their pleasure. Great, right? Wrong. Take the small amount of marijuana addicts you have now (you all know of one), and multiply that by the rest of the population not using the drug. Clearly, this become a much larger number of addicts. Not only addicts, but heavy users, and other users where using the drug have a detriment to their life. But will corporations want to help them? Of course not, because that is one of their paying customers!

Now, hypothetically, letís say that marijuana has some harm on a person. As far as Iím concerned, there has been no comprehensive, unbiased, scientifically sound study. After all, if the study is done by a corporation saying marijuana is not harmful, how can we really trust them? (or the contrary, if the result is harmful, wouldnít the marijuana activists simply disregard it as false?) Or if it seems to be from an independent source, how do you know that they havenít been paid to produce a certain result? After all, if you take a statistics class, you can prove anything with raw data. Perhaps they want a new frontier for addictive, harmful drugs to replace what they are losing in the cigarette market?

Couple this with the effect of advertising, and corporate amorality, and you start to have a real problem. A problem that is very similar to that of the cigarette epidemic that plagues the country.

Just a few things to think about before we all rush in to legalize this drug. I personally think legalization could happen, but it would have to be done very carefully, with the government having controls over the corporations that distribute the drug. However, our government does not have any good way to do this. So in my opinion we are not ready for legalization.

The only reason corporations will have this "power" is because of the self-perpetuating idiocy that is government regulation. I've seen arguments in this thread talking about everyone else having to pay in some way for the consequences of lazy pot smokers. How about making people responsible for their own well-being instead? Then, if they're lazy because they smoked pot, they'll STARVE. Others, seeing this consequence of pot abuse, will cease to use it, and those of us who can afford to smoke and still produce for ourselves WILL STILL HAVE THE ABILITY TO DO IT, instead of having retarded, paternalistic rules over our lives.

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ave the government thousands in treating your "pain" which will never go away. Save the innocent life you'll hit on the highway because the alcohol or pot made you swerve lanes. You want death, take it, and stop burdening everyone on the way.

Why should the government be responsible for a drug user in the first place? Fuck them, let them be responsible for themselves.

Likewise, why all this talk about automobile safety? why not just make people as responsible for using marijuana on the road for using alcohol on the road? It's pointless to make a distinction, and any such distinction probably stems from the stigma of marijuana versus alcohol.

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Yay, let's just legalize all currently-illegal drugs. That way everyone can go driving around on the highway doped or drugged up and kill innocent by-standers.

Or what about going on a shooting spree because the guy was so drugged up he thought he was dreaming/having a nightmare/in a video game.

Or what happens when lawyers come back and say "he was under the influence of an inhibitor that kept him from making rational decisions. Therefore, it is not my client's fault, but the fault of the drug manufacturer for not making it aware to the public" and now the crook goes free.

I swear, you fucking druggies need to stop toking up and actually use what little brain cells you have left for a change.

The lawyers COULDN'T come back and give a "rational decisions" defense, because marijuana shouldn't be treated differently as other substance abuses. MAKE PEOPLE RESPONSIBLE FOR THEIR DRUG USE, AND I PROMISE THAT THE BAD GUYS WILL GO TO JAIL AND THE GOOD GUYS CAN GET HIGH.

You forget that people sometimes CARE ABOUT THEIR OWN LIVES. Putting the principles of self-responsibility and choice aside, it is for that reason that the legalization of drugs will not be disastrous, because if there is no taxpayer money to pay for drug addicts, then they will languish and die for their bad habits. Others, knowing the consequences of drugs, will avoid them, or avoid using them like the addicts do. And it all sums up to a system FAR more rational than arbitrary preferences about which substances we can put in our bodies and which we can't.

One thing that has never been considered in these debates is the effect corporations will have on the sale of marijuana. If marijuana were fully legalized, obviously corporations would see huge profit potential in selling the drug. Naturally most of the population would be skeptical at first to try the new drug. But they would see that every person is a potential profit (children, teens, middle age, everyone). So how can they get every person to buy their product?

Advertising, of course! Yes, this will make every person NEED to smoke marijuana so they can fit in, look cool, etc. (just like toy ads, appliance ads, cigarette ads and alcohol ads do!) Imagine a young child now, just beginning to watch tv, read magazines, listen to the radio, etc. Everywhere this child will see ads wanting him to smoke this drug. Iím not going to go into the effects of advertising here, but the fact is it is brutally effective. So, to avoid a massive amount of child users, make it illegal for corporations to advertise to younger children, say under 18 (since that is when we become adults by law and can make our own decisions). But you canít do this, corporations will win every lawsuit, because it infringes on their right to sell to their target consumer (the company is a person too!). So maybe make it illegal to buy under the age of 18, just like cigarettes, which will recreate nearly every problem with the current illegal state of the drug. (which is a whole other story)

So, we have a large number of people using this harmless drug for their pleasure. Great, right? Wrong. Take the small amount of marijuana addicts you have now (you all know of one), and multiply that by the rest of the population not using the drug. Clearly, this become a much larger number of addicts. Not only addicts, but heavy users, and other users where using the drug have a detriment to their life. But will corporations want to help them? Of course not, because that is one of their paying customers!

Now, hypothetically, letís say that marijuana has some harm on a person. As far as Iím concerned, there has been no comprehensive, unbiased, scientifically sound study. After all, if the study is done by a corporation saying marijuana is not harmful, how can we really trust them? (or the contrary, if the result is harmful, wouldnít the marijuana activists simply disregard it as false?) Or if it seems to be from an independent source, how do you know that they havenít been paid to produce a certain result? After all, if you take a statistics class, you can prove anything with raw data. Perhaps they want a new frontier for addictive, harmful drugs to replace what they are losing in the cigarette market?

Couple this with the effect of advertising, and corporate amorality, and you start to have a real problem. A problem that is very similar to that of the cigarette epidemic that plagues the country.

Just a few things to think about before we all rush in to legalize this drug. I personally think legalization could happen, but it would have to be done very carefully, with the government having controls over the corporations that distribute the drug. However, our government does not have any good way to do this. So in my opinion we are not ready for legalization.

We won't have more marijuana addicts, if anything we'll have less, read the thread. If you want to participate it would be nice if you took the time to get up to date.

Corporations can be banned from advertising in certain places, just how tobacco companies can't advertise cigarettes on TV. I do not doubt this same law would be legislated against weed companies if it were legalized and I would personally support such a law.

Besides, I don't think disallowing potential weed companies to advertise would lower the exposure of the young generation to weed as 'cool and hip'. Just listen to some popular music or talk to a group of high school kids about weed. Plenty of advertising right there, so much that it's the most popular illicit drug in the US without any help from corporate advertising!

People for legalization aren't doing it because they want it legalized, regardless of any detrimental effects. They want it legalized because they want to start minimalizing the damage done by prohibtion, which is only continually getting worse and won't ever get better. And the damage done by prohibition is far greater than damage done by unproductive stoners. If new reports showed up claiming a true proven link to something terrible caused by weed, it would not be suppressed by anyone. People would be educated about it and then make a concious choice about whether to use it, just like what happened with cigarettes.

Don't come up with hypothetical situations in your head and use them as justification for things that aren't in your head. Only draw justification from the world around you when it comes to matters of this nature.

People for legalization aren't doing it because they want it legalized, regardless of any detrimental effects. They want it legalized because they want to start minimalizing the damage done by prohibtion

Really? I thought I wanted it legalized so that I could smoke it in public whenever I wanted. I sure would be lost without you telling me what I really think. Thanks!